Although Strickland defeated Blackwell by getting 60.5% of the votes, the
Columbus Dispatch's poll, ending the Friday before the Tuesday election,
predicted Strickland would get 67±1.2%. The
Dispatch noted that this "7-point
[discrepancy] broke a string of five straight gubernatorial elections in which
[our] poll exactly matched the victor's share of the vote."
(The theoretical
chance of a
statistical discrepancy this large is below one in 3 million.)

In comparison, a transfer of only 1.3% of the Ohio 2004 vote from Bush to
Kerry would have given Kerry the
presidency, and indeed CNN's exit poll at 12:21AM on election night predicted
Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio
by a 4.2% margin. The magnitude of these election manipulations (if such
there were) was
7% (or less) of the vote.

But there are other democracy-destroying problems of
larger importance
which have received far less attention, perhaps because they are too obvious.

Gerrymandering: In Ohio statewide in
2006, between 53 and 61% of voters
voted Democratic depending on the type of race (US House, Senator, or Governor),
but only 39% of the congressmen they elected were Democratic!
Conveniently,
all 4 landslide
races (vote count over 65%) were won by Democrats, while all 9 House races
closer than 60-40
were won by
Republicans.
That's called
"pack and crack" and it's a far larger distortion than
squelching a mere 7% of the voters.

Lack of voter choice and huge inherent
distortions: In the Ohio 2004 race, the
Free Press's own
Bob Fitrakis also ran for governor on an election reform platform (Green Party),
collecting 1.0% of the vote,
as did Libertarian Bill Pierce (1.8%). Of the four candidates,
only Fitrakis was pro-choice on abortion.
But surely more than 1% of Ohioans care about abortion rights and election
reform?
(10% of Ohioans have had
abortions.)

In the 2004 presidential race, all candidates besides Bush & Kerry
put together got less
than 1% of the vote, despite the fact that Bush and Kerry both
voted for the Iraq war, subsidy-laden Farm Bill, and PATRIOT act,
and both supported the drug war, WTO, and NAFTA, whereas
all the alternative candidates (and
roughly
half the US population) were against them.
In Spain, the Socialists won
control (with Socialist S.Royal
touted as the best shot at the French presidency) while the top USA socialist
got 0.003% of the vote.
Yes, French and Spaniards socialize more than than Americans, but maybe twice as
much, not 20,000 times!

These numbers represent enormous
distortions of democracy which completely
shut out important viewpoints.
Polls indicated that throughout June 2004 to now, 54-59% of Americans thought
the Iraq war was a mistake – but
neither major party candidate (the only ones who could possibly win) opposed the
war.
So voting for an anti-war candidate, such as Ralph Nader, was generally
considered a wasted vote that would
help elect the worst major party candidate. The same thing happened in the 1968
presidential election/Vietnam war.

What is going on here?
One answer is massive 2-party
domination caused by our voting system.
Our
voting system makes it strategically foolish to vote for any candidate
besides the two majors – even
if by far your favorite –
because that "wastes your vote."
Indeed "vote splitting"
can cause the
candidate least-liked by a voter
majority, to win.
Presumably for those reasons, about 90% of voters who told pollsters they
thought Nader
was the best candidate in 2000, actually voted for somebody else.
That
distortion is a huge obstacle for
candidates like Nader. Consequently strong candidates usually refuse to run
third party.
Over time, all this causes third parties to die out.
Political scientists
call that "Duverger's law."
Voters call it "getting the minimum possible amount of choice" – indeed it's
usually worse than that since
US elections are
98%
predictable over a year ahead (far worse than any comparable democracy – in
India, it's below 50%).

Ballot access laws:
Not only have third
parties been marginalized by the voting system,
they often can't even get on the ballot
thanks to a state-by-state crazy quilt of non-uniform and often
amazingly-restrictive
ballot access laws.
Joe Lieberman's successful 2006 Independent run
to re-win his senate seat in CT would have been
illegal in 46 of the 50 states.
In the approximately 400 US House races in Georgia since 1943,
zero third-party candidates
ever succeeded in getting on the ballot, thanks to huge petitioning requirements
omitted for
the two major-party candidates.

How to fix it:
1. Congress can and should enact uniform ballot-access standards.
Because
in all US history since the age of preprinted ballots began (about 1890) up to
2005, there have only
been two cases where a ballot for some statewide office (or US
presidential race) has ever had more
than 10 candidates, provided at least 2500 signatures were required to
get on ballot
(and even in those two cases, there were less than a dozen candidates), we
recommend
that be the sole requirement in any race
for statewide office.
2. The
"shortest
splitline algorithm" is a simple way to draw districts.
It eliminates all bias because
the district shapes are uniquely determined by the population distribution and
shape of the state.
3. "Range Voting" is:
each voter scores each candidate on an 0-to-9 scale (it is permitted to leave
some unscored)
and the highest average score wins.
It's used by Olympic judges.
Interestingly, it's also been used
for millions of years by
honeybees.
• Switching to range voting is easy:
all voting machines
can handle it with no modifications and no reprogramming.
(Even easier is
"Approval
voting" which is the "0 or 1 only" form of range voting where voters just
approve or disapprove each candidate.
That's actually
simpler than the current voting system
because it just discards the "no overvote" rule.)
• It gets rid of the "spoiler" and "vote splitting" effects: voting your
favorite top is never strategically
unwise
and if you do it you can still express
your opinions of all the other candidates in your vote.
• Because of that, it should gradually allow third-parties to enter the picture.
• Your vote expresses the most you can, not the least you can.

To begin to see how much distortion our democracy is suffering by not using
Range Voting, consider these facts:
• Nader was a nonfactor in 2004 with 133 times fewer votes than Bush, but our
exit poll
found he would only
have been a factor of about 1.6 below Bush's total with Range Voting.
• A study by Brams and Fishburn found that Anderson would probably have come in
second (behind Reagan
but ahead of Carter) in 1980, if Approval Voting had been used.

These huge distortions far outweigh a piddly 7%.

A wrong "fix":
"Instant runoff
voting" (IRV), while it may initially sound attractive to the uninformed, is
inferior to range voting.
• Won't work on many present-day voting machines and
can't
be counted in precincts.
• Voting your favorite top is
often
strategically unwise.
• Spoiler effect
still is present
(just in a
more
subtle
form) and still
leads to
massive 2-party domination in
every country in which IRV has been tried, e.g. Australia.
Meanwhile the closely
related genuine-runoff system usually has
not
led to 2-party domination.
For this reason, it is foolish for, e.g, the
Green Party, to support IRV – and especially foolish
to support replacing genuine runoffs with IRV.
• Greatly
increases
the risk of election-tie nightmares.
• Experimentally
increases
ballot spoilage and uncounted votes.
More complicated than range voting.
• Tends to
favor
"extremists" and prevent "centrists" from winning (say computer
simulations).